the little engine that could

In the past four days I have aged 20 years... -me to my best friend Rachel

One of the curses of taking a semester's worth of graduate-level statistics and economics squeezed into one month is that the sheer volume of material covered is not accompanied by the appropriate amount of time for me to digest and master it. One of the blessings, though, is that I'm already, essentially, halfway through the course. Thank God. Whew.

After the first week of instruction, I was feeling very defeated and discouraged. To add insult to injury, over the weekend we had two problem sets, one for statistics and one for economics, that were driving me up the wall! 

The assignments themselves were pretty interesting and relevant. We were analyzing the change in global public debt following the financial crisis in 2007-2008, the success of universities to provide pathways to economic mobility to low-income students, the accuracy of HIV tests to provide true positives and true negatives, the total cost of hurricanes (damage cost) in the U.S., and the effects of rent control measures and taxes on specific goods. However, multiple times throughout the weekend I became very frustrated as I got "stuck" on parts of certain problems. It was a lot of trial and error trying to get the math right and trying to figure out how to accomplish the things I wanted to through Excel. Excel is still my best frenemy (but thanks for the keyboard shortcuts, Gretchen!). 

But worry not! The purpose of this blog post is not just to complain about my first world problems of "struggling" in my graduate studies at a selective private university. Friday night I had a soul-healing conversation with a friend who is not in the Master of Public Affairs program. Over some delicious Korean fried chicken wings and drumsticks, I told her all about my first week and she was so empathetic. It was nice to sit back, laugh, and talk about feelings rather than numbers!! What a breath of fresh air. Thanks, Ellen!

I'm also incredibly thankful to have found some classmates to work on the problem sets with, even if that meant working with my classmate for an hour on the hurricanes problem, only to find out that we were doing all of the math wrong. What matters is that we arrived at the correct answers eventually. There's something so satisfying about putting in the hours to persevere and finally figuring it out in the end. 

I still had to skip church on Sunday and work non-stop through 1:00am Monday to complete everything, but the sense of accomplishment I feel now that we've gotten our grades back? Priceless.

I would also be remiss to neglect thanking the folks back home who were able to both pray for me and cheer me on from afar. My dad gave me a pep talk on Sunday morning that helped me power through the tears. Shauna Malwae-Tweep, you're my inspiration. 

This week I've spent my free time slowly working through math problems that we work through in class and the problems that are a part of online quizzes we take before class. I get stressed out when I'm in a group of people and everyone seems to be rocketing through questions when I'm still on part (1)(a). I've come to an acceptance that I complete things at slower pace than others, and that's okay. This may come back to haunt me when trying to complete the final exam in the time limit of three hours, but I won't worry about that for now. As Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." He knew what he was talking about!!

In terms of school-life balance, I'm still working on it... I will try and have "fun" this weekend, I guess. Frivolity? Never heard of it!!

Until next time...